Chelsea and playing out from the back: Why is it not working and is pressure the problem? (2024)

Chelsea returned from their 16-day pre-season tour in the United States on Wednesday with unresolved defensive issues at the top of new head coach Enzo Maresca’s priority list.

The five friendly matches in the U.S. yielded one clean sheet and 12 goals conceded, with Chelsea’s defending at times degrading from flawed to farcical.

With the returns of Cole Palmer and Nicolas Jackson to first-team training at Cobham, Maresca has good reason to believe the efficiency of an attack that mustered nine goals in the five games will naturally click into a higher gear, but the idea that getting back Marc Cucurella or Axel Disasi can have a similarly transformative impact at the other end of the pitch seems a tad optimistic.

Chelsea’s problems at the back are bigger than that — partly a legacy of the brief Mauricio Pochettino era, and partly a consequence of players adjusting to the requirements of summer appointment Maresca’s system.

Let’s take a closer look at three of the biggest reasons why Chelsea’s defence is failing.

Chelsea are not playing well in traffic

Maresca’s specific demands when playing out from the back have been well documented: a goalkeeper advancing into the defensive line, one full-back inverting into central midfield, two No 8s ready to punish opponents who press aggressively by receiving incisive passes in the half-spaces and driving forward in support of the front three.

The idea is that Chelsea will always have numerical superiority in the first phase of their possession, making it easier to retain and progress the ball. But in order for that to be the case, Maresca’s defenders need to be comfortable playing around and through opposition pressure and his midfielders must make good decisions “in the traffic”, as he says.

There were glaring struggles in both of those areas in last weekend’s 4-2 defeat against Manchester City, who ruthlessly exploited Chelsea’s uncertainty with a narrow four-man pressing unit.

Here, inside the first two minutes, Robert Sanchez passes out to Moises Caicedo, who immediately lays the ball back to Tosin Adarabioyo. With two City attackers converging in his field of vision, Tosin tries to play a first-time pass with his weaker left foot to Romeo Lavia, but instead scuffs it to the onrushing Jack Grealish.

The loose ball bounces kindly to Erling Haaland, who wins a penalty from a scrambling Levi Colwill.

Chelsea conceded again in alarmingly similar circ*mstances almost immediately.

This time, Tosin passes right to Reece James, who threads a ball between Haaland and Grealish to the feet of Caicedo. Under immediate pressure, he attempts a first-time pass back to Tosin, but his effort is underhit and the former Fulham defender is in no position to receive it. Haaland pounces on the loose ball and finishes in typically clinical style.

City were not the only opponents to test Chelsea’s comfort level on the ball.

A week earlier, Celtic also pressed Maresca’s team hard and high in central areas and were rewarded for it — most memorably in the sequence below where Tosin plays a back pass to Sanchez in retreat, the goalkeeper moves it quickly on to Benoit Badiashile and the Frenchman’s ill-advised pass across his own penalty area, aimed at Tosin, effectively creates Celtic’s third goal of the game.

It is possible that some of these errors are the product of their pre-season environment. “It’s not the same to play as in Europe, as the pitches are so good in Europe and here (in the U.S.) they are not so good,” Caicedo said. “The pitches are so dry. We know we are players with amazing qualities, but sometimes it is not you. It’s the pitches.”

But costly errant touches and misguided passes were an all-too-frequent feature of Chelsea’s passing out of the defensive third last season under Pochettino, too.

More time and familiarity with Maresca’s clearly defined system may help simplify decision-making and execution in such situations. Chelsea need the ball to move with more speed and precision, because opposition pressure will only grow in intensity and sophistication once the Premier League kicks off next weekend.

Inconsistent pressing leaves the high line exposed

Maresca created headlines after the 2-1 defeat against Real Madrid on Tuesday by appearing to lay one aspect of Chelsea’s defensive problems at the feet of predecessor Pochettino.

“We are not working on defensive lines so high,” he insisted. “It’s a habit from last year, or years ago; I don’t know. We are trying to drop the defensive line a little bit, usually about four or five metres, just to have some advantage. Last year, we already conceded many goals with this problem. Hopefully, we can solve it very soon.”

These comments were a little puzzling since, for all of its many flaws, Pochettino’s back line was not consistently stationed spectacularly high up the pitch — particularly in the many minutes when it was being marshalled by a 38-year-old Thiago Silva.

Maresca’s views after the Celtic loss shed more light on the precise nature of the issue. “One of the things we did bad today was when the ball was not under pressure, to maintain the high line,” he said. “When the ball is not under pressure, you need to drop.”

Regardless of the tactical system, a high defensive line becomes a liability rather than an asset when opponents are given time and space on the ball to play passes either through and over it. Chelsea’s execution of their high line has been sloppy at times, but it looks even worse because their pressing from the front has at best been inconsistent and at worst disappeared altogether.

There were some particularly ugly sequences against Celtic.

Here, despite applying no pressure on the ball, Chelsea’s back line is so ludicrously high it resembles a nine-man Ange Postecoglou Tottenham team. Brendan Rodgers’ Scottish champions opt against an easy ball over the top, instead luring in Colwill with a short pass forward before whipping the play out to the right touchline.

James, realising he needs to get back in line with his defensive team-mates, steps up at just the wrong moment while Wesley Fofana is simply slow to react to the developing attack. The result is that Chelsea’s line is broken, with both men left trailing badly behind the play.

Real Madrid exploit a similar confluence of errors in our next GIF.

Thibaut Courtois is able to find eventual goalscorer Dani Ceballos unmarked on the half-turn, and he moves the ball on to Rodrygo. Retreating into his own half from the left flank, the Brazilian is allowed to turn infield too easily and, suddenly, Chelsea’s defensive line is frozen in a compromising position, with a large gap between Badiashile and Colwill and acres of open space between them and the goal.

Rodrgyo threads a precise pass through to connect with Brahim Diaz’s diagonal run in behind, and a scrambling defence never fully recovers.

At times, Chelsea’s pressing appears confused, with team-mates gesturing to each other as opponents advance unchecked.

At other times, Maresca’s players have simply displayed a lack of the required physical intensity to apply significant pressure on the ball.

Each of these issues should be eased with improved fitness and familiarity, but both are cause for concern because effective pressing was one of the good habits Chelsea developed under Pochettino last season; they averaged 10.7 opponent passes per defensive action (PPDA) in 2023-24, the fourth-best average in the Premier League, and ranked seventh in the division for high turnovers generated (343).

Pressing was similarly important for Maresca at promotion-bound Leicester City last season; their 11.1 PPDA was the third-best average in the Championship and they also ranked seventh for high turnovers generated (362). Building a similarly effective structure out of possession will be crucial to his hopes of enjoying success at Chelsea too.

Opponents are targeting the weaknesses of Maresca’s defensive shape

One of the more obvious ripple effects of Chelsea’s sloppiness with and without the ball in their matches on tour was that their opponents were given too many chances to target the weak spots in Maresca’s rest defence.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the arrangement of the five men Maresca typically keeps behind the ball to guard against counter-attacks: three centre-backs screened by two midfielders (one of which is an inverted full-back). It is, after all, the same base defensive structure that helped Thomas Tuchel swiftly turn Chelsea into Champions League winners in 2020-21. But the nature of football is that every tactical system has particular strengths and weaknesses.

In this case, Maresca’s rest defence is vulnerable to quick passes or switches of play out to the flanks, where wingers or wide attackers can then force Chelsea’s centre-backs to defend large spaces in one-v-one situations.

Tuchel’s team at their best were rarely exposed in this way because their exceptional pressing from the front made those passes very difficult to play, and N’Golo Kante was a force of destructive nature in midfield. Today’s Chelsea do not have a Kante and are not pressing as effectively, meaning their defenders have more transition attacks to contend with.

Just as when he was regularly deployed at left-back by Pochettino in the first half of last season, Colwill is being tasked with defending in isolation against fast, skilful opposing right-wingers.

Here, against Celtic, Carney Chukwuemeka presses high without adequate support and is easily bypassed. Within two passes, the ball has reached Chelsea’s left flank, where Colwill is forced to backpedal and eventually gives up a shooting chance in the penalty area that brings a good save out of Sanchez.

On this occasion against City, the ball begins safely in Chelsea’s control but a wayward Raheem Sterling pass intended for Malo Gusto springs a four-v-four break, exposing Colwill. Oscar Bobb isolates against him, works space to shoot on his left foot and fires a low shot through the Cobham graduate’s legs and into the net at the near post.

Colwill is clearly uncomfortable defending these situations, and Disasi had similar problems facing wingers on the right of Chelsea’s defence last season.

Beyond making more drastic changes to either Maresca’s system or the defensive personnel, this particular issue can be mitigated by the team collectively passing and pressing better.

Chelsea have the toughest possible assignment to open their 2024-25 Premier League season, hosting champions City at Stamford Bridge next Sunday. Maresca will relish facing off against his friend, former boss and mentor Pep Guardiola, but the occasion will quickly turn into a nightmare if scoring chances prove as easy for Haaland to find as they were in Columbus, Ohio last weekend.

Pochettino’s team scored freely enough in 2023-24 (77 goals) to mount a serious challenge for Champions League qualification. It was Chelsea’s historically bad defensive record that prevented them from ever truly getting into that race, finishing five points adrift of Aston Villa in sixth place only after a run of five straight victories to close the campaign.

Maresca is unlikely to think about attack and defence in such segmented terms. His system is geared towards achieving control with and without the ball and the better Chelsea’s players become at executing it, the more likely they are to meet the required standards in both boxes.

But last season’s stat of 63 league goals conceded — most of them avoidable, some simply awful — is the most obvious area for improvement as Maresca aims to bridge the gap to the top four.

On the worrying evidence of those pre-season matches in America, there is plenty of defensive work to be done on the training pitches at Cobham over the next week or so.

(Top photo: Rich von Biberstein/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

Liam is a Staff Writer for The Athletic, covering Chelsea. He previously worked for Goal covering the Premier League before becoming the Chelsea correspondent for ESPN in 2015, witnessing the unravelling of Jose Mourinho, the rise and fall of Antonio Conte, the brilliance of Eden Hazard and the madness of Diego Costa. He has also contributed to The Independent and ITV Sport. Follow Liam on Twitter @liam_twomey